Saturday, May 16, 2009

My workflow

After posting about the X.Org supermodule I was asked for more details about how to get everything up and running. So here's my usual workflow. I'm open for improvements in the (moderated) comments.

Prerequisites

My workflow currently includes two patches to git, the second of which is still under review.Install git from git and apply these patches. They add rebasing support to git submodule update and make the process a lot easier.

Set up a bunch of environment variables that you'll need each time you build:

Building X.Org from git in 5 steps

The supermodule is set up for automatic rebasing and you'll end up with a tree running each module on master. The last command builds everything in the right order and - with the "-f" flag - echos the modules being built into the built.modules file. If it fails (usually due to missing packages) you can resume from the last to-be-built component (the last one in built.modules).

Once that is done, you're left with an X tree in /opt/xorg, most important of which is the binary in /opt/xorg/bin/Xorg.

Working with the tree

I tend to have three or more branches in most repos. The branches that matter are "master", "queue" and "devel". Then I have additional branches for features that result in a patch series (e.g. "xi2").

"master" is always as close to upstream master as I can get. Anything that lands on master will likely be rebased and pushed upstream. Day-to-day bugfixing also happens on master.

"queue" is for patches I sent to the xorg-devel list. The workflow here is usally development on some other branch, then git-format-patch + email, then cherry-picking from the other branch to queue. Patches in "queue" get cherry-picked to master and pushed, and once master is pushed, "queue" is rebased onto master.

"devel" usually happens when I realize that the patch series on master is more than it should be. This is when I branch master into devel, reset master to the previous state and continue on devel. devel is heavily rebased and sometimes doesn't lead anywhere. If it does, intermediate patches are cherry-picked onto master and pushed when they're ready. devel is deleted as soon as I finish with it.

Feature branches (e.g. "xi2") tend to be the same as devel but with a specific feature in mind. Anything that isn't related to it (bugs that I find in code around that feature) is cherry-picked to master and queue, and the feature branch then rebased.

So a single patch may wander from xi2 to devel (when xi2 is branched for some reason) to queue to master before being pushed.

I've been using this workflow for months now, and one of the main reasons why it works fine for me is tig. Tig shows other branches heads and tags in the history list, so by rebasing often I always have a visual marker where the new patches start. Tig also makes cherry-picking easy, so I use it more often than git pull.

The other thing that is incredibly helpful is the zsh git prompt I got from here and modified a bit. My current output reads:

:: whot@dingo:~/xorg/xserver (xi2*+)>

Where xi2 is the branch name, * shows I have changes not added to the index, + shows I have changes added to the index that will be committed. I cannot recommend this prompt for the kernel though, it takes to long. For the repos I work with it's fine.

A word about backups

Since most of the work is local, it's important to have a backup, especially for devel branches that live longer than a day or two. I added a "backup" remote and force-push the branch I've been working on at the end of each day to this remote. In the worst case, I can just clone from there and resume where I left off.